"I really thought it would work this time but I was wrong. I mean, seriously, just listen to my vacant and pathetic rambling for ten or twenty minutes and you'll see that this is pure satire! Oh well, I guess I'll have to keep on trying," said famous parody "Pastor" David Hughes from Church by the Glades. He tried his best to give a ridiculous, over-the-top and exaggerated "Seeker-Friendly" speech as a form of instructive satire, but it appears that his audience failed to get the point, in spite of cringe-worthy statements like... 

• "Jesus leveraged popular culture, his presentation was remarkable!"

• "God wants to get all up in your stuff!"

• "Fun is cool! I don't apologize for fun, I think church should be fun, in Jesus name!"

• "Here's why we leverage popular culture, here's why we speak into culture, here's why we use things other churches won't use: It's Biblical."

• "When we use pop culture in church we're just ripping off Jesus."

Hughes even went so far as to put the words CHURCH SHOULD BE FUN in bright lights on the two-story backdrop of his megachurch, hoping that the glaring idiocy would be too obvious to ignore. No one can blame him for making a valiant effort; he pummeled relentlessly for forty minutes in a bizarre collection of scripture-twisting, bad argumentation, a gross mischaracterization of Jesus being a crowd-pleasing communicator who attracted a large audience because he "wasn't boring," and even ending with a megachurch cliche: a manipulative story to try and justify his self-refuting spectacle. Yet, he was unable to get his point across about the dangers of the church becoming a parody of itself as it panders to the surrounding culture. "If I continue foisting these outrageous satires onto my church, I hope that eventually the people will notice that the true Jesus who died in our place to become the Savior of the world is clearly absent," said Hughes.

Although Hughes claimed to value "Jesus and the Bible" above everything else, he made his own ideas the focus of the entire speech instead of the Bible, and only referred to Jesus in little snippets, where he made it sound like Jesus was the Pop Star of his day. After Hughes did everything he could think of to be self-refuting, even using "I Heart (love) Pop" as the title of his sermon series, his parishioners still thought he was giving a biblical sermon. 

"I was certain that jumping up and down on a gigantic couch would have done the trick last year, but this time I tried a different approach," said Hughes in an exclusive interview with Pirate Christian Media, "this time I went ahead and gave every stupid and far-fetched reason why an entertaining spectacle can be a viable substitute for an actual worship service. These people still think my thinly-disguised satire was real. I have to admit, I'm not too happy about this."

Hughes went on to say that he had more "sermons" to "preach" in this parody series, and he remained hopeful that his bombastic and ridiculous motivational speeches will eventually open the eyes of the nearly 10,000 listeners he reaches every week.   

Visual Proof That Modern Churches Are (Much) Better

A Manifesto of Christian Discernment

The "Disney-fication" of the Church Youtube video by BezelT3